


dog tags

by imposterhuman



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Boys In Love, Developing Relationship, Dog Tags, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Ironhusbands, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, M/M, MIT Era, Rhodey Is a Good Bro, Rhodey Needs a Hug, Tony Needs a Hug, Tony has a heart, rhodey has a heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-03 20:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20459360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imposterhuman/pseuds/imposterhuman
Summary: 5 times rhodey lent tony his dog tags, and 1 time he gave them to tony for good





	dog tags

**Author's Note:**

> i know nothing about dog tags and the military except that this was a sweet lil idea, so suspend your disbelief!
> 
> enjoy :)

**1.**

“Do you really have to go, Honey Bear?” Tony pouted, crossing his arms. He looked a little like an angry kitten, Rhodey decided, with his bedhead and Bambi eyes. 

He was about to go on his first tour with the Air Force. It would be the first time since they met that Rhodey didn’t see Tony for six months straight (their record was two over summer break before Tony came over and spent the rest with the Rhodes family). Rhodey knew it was going to be hard on both of them.

“You know I do, Tones,” he said, ruffling Tony’s hair fondly and messing it up more. “It’s only six months; I’ll be back before you know it.”

“Six months is a long time,” Tony said, dejected. “I could have another degree in six months. I could revolutionize entire industries in six months. I could-”

“You could finally hit your growth spurt?” teased Rhodey. He tilted Tony’s chin up to look him in the eyes. “You’re gonna be just fine, Tones. You’re gonna call once a week and send me too much shit, and I’m gonna roll my eyes but love it anyway. And when I get back, we’re going to spend a solid week just fucking around, deal?”

Tony averted his gaze. “What if…” he cleared his throat. His voice was hoarse with unshed tears. “What if you don’t come back?”

“Hey, Tony, no,” Rhodey pulled his friend into a tight hug. He’d forgotten how  _ young  _ Tony was. The three year age difference felt like so much longer in terms of maturity, sometimes. “Don’t think like that. You know I’ll be back. In fact..” he pulled his dog tags off of his neck and put them around Tony’s. “Here. Now, I  _ have  _ to come back. I can’t lose my tags, you know.”

Tony looked at him with a watery smile. “You’re a dork,” he accused, worrying the chain between his fingers. “Don’t you need to take these with you?”

“Eh,” Rhodey waved a hand. Technically he did, but he’d just get another set. Tony’s peace of mind was more important than a piece of metal. “I’ll take them next time. I’d rather you have them, anyway.”

“I’ll see you in six months,” Tony promised, pressing a kiss to Rhodey’s cheek. “Don’t get blown up.”

Rhodey barked out a laugh. “Six months,” he repeated. “Keep my tags safe, will you?"

**2.**

Tony was used to people leaving. Ty, Sunset, everyone left him in the end. He was fine with that; it was his lot as a Stark. He didn’t need anyone or anything besides his own mind.

That was harder to remember when he was seeing Rhodey off again, a familiar (and painful) routine. Rhodey had had two weeks of leave, the last week of which he had spent with Tony. Tony hadn’t wanted it to end, but unfortunately, he had yet to invent a time machine.

The airport was busy and crowded, but Tony only had eyes for his oldest friend.

“You have to go?” he asked, an old and decided argument. 

Rhodey nodded. “You know that, Tones,” he said. “It’s only six more months.”

“Be safe,” Tony put on a brave face as best he could. It was hard, without his best friend around. Obie was pushing him more and more with the company after his parents’ deaths, wanting bigger and better weapons to fix the stock drops. Tony always had to be on, to be Tony Stark. Without Rhodey, there was no one with whom he could just be Tony. “There should be some presents coming your way, if you’re good.”

One of the few upsides of the weapons he made was that they kept Rhodey safe. That was what Tony reminded himself, everytime he thought about how much blood was on his hands. Rhodey was safe because of Stark weaponry, and that was worth the guilt to him. 

“I’ll be just fine,” Rhodey clapped him on the shoulder. “You take care, too, Tones. I know Stane’s riding you, but make sure you take some breaks, okay?”

“Okay, Mom,” Tony rolled his eyes fondly. “You’re going to miss your flight. Shouldn’t you get going?”

“One last thing,” Rhodey took off one set of dog tags, putting them around Tony’s neck. He always did it before he deployed; it was his promise that he’d be back. Tony thought it was remarkably impractical, seeing as he needed them on the field, but Rhodey wouldn’t budge. The dork had gotten a second set, just so he could carry on their little tradition. “Keep them safe.”

“You know I will, Sour Patch,” Tony hugged him tight, ignoring the traitorous tears on his face as Rhodey kissed the top of his head. “I’ll see you in six months.”

**3.**

As Rhodey was technically deployed, Tony had his tags in Afghanistan, hidden under his bulletproof vest. Their weight reassured him as he demonstrated the Jericho in all its destructive beauty. Even when he was sniping at Rhodey, sending him to the Hum-Drum-vee, he could feel the metal on his chest. 

When the bomb exploded, though, Tony couldn’t feel them anymore. He could feel pain, burning agony, but not the coolness of Rhodey’s tags. It felt like he was missing something, like someone had carved a piece of him out of his chest (later, he wondered how many of those feelings were influenced by the surgery. It didn’t really matter; he’d lost a piece of himself in the sand either way). 

“Do you have a family?” Yinsen asked him, late at night after a long day of work on the suit.

Tony almost said no. But he could still feel the phantom weight of Rhodey’s dog tags around his neck and he knew with certainty that his friend was still looking for him. If that wasn’t family, Tony didn’t know what it was. 

“Yes,” he answered. “And he’s coming for me.”

“We’ll just have to meet him halfway then, won’t we?” Yinsen’s eyes had sparkled when he said it, like he was happy for Tony.

Yinsen’s eyes weren’t sparkling anymore.  _ Don’t waste your life _ echoed through the cave with Tony’s bullets. He was getting out of the cave; Yinsen’s sacrifice wouldn’t be for nothing.

Against all odds, he did it. He flew out of there in a suit of armor made of a box of scraps, with a miniaturized arc reactor in his chest in place of a heart. Of course, he crashed in the desert almost immediately after, but he was  _ free _ .

Tony wasn’t sure how long he wandered before he heard the helicopter. He had long since passed dehydrated and sunburnt, and the hallucinations had already. Every step was agony, but he kept walking. When he saw the helicopter’s approach, though, he fell to his knees. He didn’t care if it was a hallucination; it had to be real. He couldn’t handle it if it wasn’t real.

Rhodey’s (real, solid) arms around him felt like safety, like family. 

“Next time, you ride with me,” he said fiercely, holding Tony close. 

Tony was more than a little delirious. “I lost them,” he panted out, groping at his chest. “I said I’d keep them safe… I-”

“Shh, Tones,” Rhodey soothed. “It’s okay. It’s fine, it’s not your fault.”

“I lost them,” Tony repeated, panicked.

Rhodey drew his tags off of his neck, gently putting them over Tony’s. “No, you didn’t, see?” he laid them flat over the blue glow of the arc reactor. “They’re right here, see?”

When they clinked into place, held stationary by the magnetic force of the reactor, it felt like coming home.

**4.**

Rhodey kissed Tony for the first time after the Expo that the idiot put on- while  _ dying _ \- and subsequently blew up. It was oddly emblematic of their relationship, Rhodey figured, to have their first kiss while explosions went in the background and Pepper looked on, unimpressed. 

“You look like two heavily armored seals fighting over a grape,” she said dryly. “It’s weird.”

“It’s not weird!” Tony defended. He turned to Rhodey. “Was that weird?”

“A little bit,” Rhodey admitted. Before Tony’s face could fall, he pulled the shorter man into another kiss. “But a good weird.” 

“Good,” Tony smiled, something open and honest and  _ real _ . Rhodey knew it was too early to say anywhere but the privacy of his own mind, but  _ god _ , did he love Tony. He loved the man with every bit of his heart, the way he had since Tony had wormed his way into Rhodey’s life back at MIT. 

But duty didn’t stop for love, as much as Rhodey wished it would. He wanted to stay home with Tony, to exchange lazy kisses on the couch and figure out where they were going, but the Air Force still needed him. And SI needed Tony, even if he’d made Pepper CEO. It didn’t mean he had to like it, though.

“This sucks,” Rhodey admitted, smoothing down his uniform before he left Tony’s penthouse. 

Tony watched him with an unreadable expression. “Yeah,” he said finally, eyes showing his sadness. “It really does.”

“It won’t be for as long this time,” Rhodey said, trying to console himself as much as Tony. “Only a month. Month and a half, tops.”

“It’ll be a long month,” Tony stepped closer, resting his head on Rhodey’s shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Rhodey agreed. “It will be. But you’ll call me, and I’ll call you, and you can probably piss my superiors off enough to send me home early.”

Tony grinned wolfishly. “Is that a challenge?”

“No, Tony.”

“Aw,” he pouted. “I could totally do it, you know.”

“And that’s what scares me,” Rhodey shook his head fondly. He leaned in for a kiss, chaste and tender. He hoped it said everything he couldn’t put into words, everything he felt for the amazing man in front of him. Drawing back, he took his dog tags off of his neck to give to Tony, as usual. 

Tony accepted them trustingly, kissing Rhodey again. “Come home safe,” he said sternly, pushing Rhodey out the door. “Love you.”

Then he slammed the door in Rhodey’s face.

Rhodey touched a hand to his tingling lips and stared at the closed door. He had to go or risk missing his flight, as much as he wanted to stay. 

One month couldn’t go by fast enough.

**5\. **

Being dead sucked. Well,  _ presumed  _ dead. Tony had called Rhodey from a payphone in Rose Hill to let him know that he was alive, but it didn’t change the fact that he was all alone in the middle of nowhere (minus the kid, who Tony had a strange fondness for that he didn’t want to examine too closely). 

It also meant that when the crazy fire-breathing assholes attacked, Tony didn’t have his Rhodey as backup. 

He drew Brandt out of the bar before she could hurt anyone else, adrenaline pounding in his veins as he tried to think of a plan. All of his genius had left him when her hands started to glow. If he had the suit, she’d be toast. If he had Rhodey, she wouldn’t even be a smear on the pavement. But he was alone and unarmed and probably going to die. 

Tony tripped on the pavement, his handcuffed hands useless to catch him. He laid on the ground for a second, panting. There was metal on his face; Rhodey’s dog tags had come out from under his shirt and the chain was laying across his nose. Rhodey was still deployed as Iron Patriot, so Tony had them around his neck for safekeeping. They were made of sturdy stuff, having survived the almost unreasonable amount of explosions and fire he’d been in the past several days.

The beginnings of a plan started to form when Tony saw the cafe he had fallen in front of. With a running leap, he propelled himself through the glass window, Brandt a pace behind him. He slid over the counter painfully, but he didn’t have time to worry about if he’d broken anything.

Brandt grabbed him, pushing him to the floor with a laugh. Tony was no match for her and her training. He wouldn’t be able to beat her; he just needed to get away from her. He twisted, using a move Rhodey had taught him, wrapping his handcuff chain around her neck and pulling.

As predicted, she just grinned and heated up, the chain snapping like it was nothing. Tony pried the hot metal off of his wrists with a hiss of pain, kicked over the container of oil, and slid the molten metal into the spill.

The fire almost burned him. It worked as a distraction and Tony sprinted for the kitchens. Regretfully, he pulled off Rhodey’s tags and pressed a kiss to the warm metal. Then he shoved them in the microwave. 

“You walked right into this one,” he taunted as Brandt pushed her way through the kitchen doors, burning from the inside out. “My boyfriend is hotter than you.”

“That’s all you got?” she asked, standing. “A cheap trick and a cheesy one-liner?”

“Sweetheart,” Tony pulled the gas line right as the microwave started to beep. “That could be the name of my autobiography.”

He took a moment to mourn the loss of Rhodey’s tags as the building blew up. Tony hoped that that wouldn’t be a theme in their relationship: Rhodey giving something to Tony for safekeeping as a sign of trust, and Tony blowing it up in a dramatic fashion.

Well. He wouldn’t know until he made it home to Rhodey. 

With a sigh, Tony picked his bruised and battered body off of the ground. He had work to do.

**+1.**

Rhodey felt a little like he was cheating on Tony, if he was being honest, the way he was going behind his back to a different engineer. While Tony had the most advanced engineering lab in the world in his basement, he also had the nosiest AIs that would have ratted him out in a second. 

Rhodey wanted the ring to be a surprise, not something DUM-E spilled the beans on.

It was a simple metal band, made to stand up to the stress of the lab and the suits. The ring was plain, fairly unremarkable, and definitely not something that anyone would expect from Tony Stark.

It was also made of Rhodey’s dog tags, the metal melted and poured into a mold that Rhodey had designed. There were also pieces of the War Machine armor in the alloy, but the tags were the core of the piece.

Now, the only thing left to do was propose. 

Rhodey had prepared Tony’s favorite meal (an Italian pasta that he couldn’t pronounce, but he cooked well) and set the table with the nicer set of plates. He was determined to do things right. It was what Tony deserved.

The meal went by faster than Rhodey expected, Tony chattering on about his latest project while Rhodey attempted to not look like a lovestruck dork. He was pretty sure it didn’t work, but he didn’t mind all that much. Too soon, Tony was offering to clean up if Rhodey picked a movie.

Rhodey took a deep breath, feeling the weight of the ring box in his pocket.

“Tony, wait,” he said, stopping the other man from getting up. 

“Yeah, Platypus?” Tony looked curious, not alarmed, which was good. 

Rhodey reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “I love you,” he said honestly. “I’ve loved you since you were a scrawny idiot with too big of a mouth, and I’ll love you until we’re old and gray.”

“Bold of you to assume I’m ever going to have gray hair,” Tony retorted quietly, eyes looking suspiciously shiny.

“You’re my better half, Tones, and as much as you drive me crazy, I’d be lost without you,” Rhodey admitted. He got out of his chair and sank to one knee. “So, Tony Stark, will you marry me?”

Tony covered his mouth with his hand in surprise. Tears were openly falling down his face, but he was grinning. “Of course I will,” he choked out, kissing Rhodey. “I love you, too.”

Rhodey slid the ring onto Tony’s finger. “You’re gonna keep this safe for me?” he couldn’t have stopped smiling if he tried. 

“Oh, Honey Bear,” Tony said, examining the ring. “You’re never getting this back.”

Rhodey kissed his fiance again. “Good.”

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos make me happy!!
> 
> yell at me on tumblr [@imposter-human](https://imposter-human.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [men are made of glass and gas station wine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20621561) by [lizwillstealyourgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizwillstealyourgirl/pseuds/lizwillstealyourgirl)


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